Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.0

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission Blu-ray Movie Review

We can only hope.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 12, 2014

Let’s face it: Uwe Boll is never going to be mentioned in the same sentence as, say, Orson Welles or Ingmar Bergman, unless as a salient example of antipodes. But whatever one may think about Boll, he continues to crank out movies (it’s probably a stretch to call them “films”) at a regular rate, and whoever is handling his press certainly has no problem promoting the product in perhaps unintentionally humorous ways. The latest case in point: In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission, yet another straight to video offering from Boll that has the somewhat misleading imprimatur “too intense for theaters” emblazoned on its back cover. If you’ve seen any given Uwe Boll outing, you probably already know it’s best to go in to these efforts with the bar lowered to a level that would make limbo impossible, at least unless you were as two dimensional as most of Boll’s characters turn out to be. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale started this lamentable franchise in 2007, back before Jason Statham had quite achieved his present day renown and when the balding action star was still willing to appear in low rent fare like this. The first entry of this trilogy was based on the game Dungeon Seige and played out as a fairly straightforward fantasy. Despite the fact that the film (okay, there I’ve relented) only made a completely embarrassing three million or so in ticket sales, Boll forged ahead with a sequel entitled In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds, which posited Dolph Lundgren in a time travel story that had absolutely no connection to the first outing other than its title. Boll is on hand here in the lone supplement discussing his burning desire to make yet another King, saying he loved the time travel premise but wanted a “better main actor” (take that, Lundgren!) and so settled on his frequent collaborator Dominic Purcell (Prison Break: Season One). Purcell plays burnt out hitman Hazen Kaine, an American who is plying his trade in Bulgaria (what—there aren’t enough potential targets in the United States?). Kaine wants out of this messy trade, especially since he’s nursing the wounds of his own family having been slaughtered, but his handlers have one more assignment for him (hence the title), kidnapping the children of a guy who is alternately described as either the ruler of Bulgaria or just a really rich tycoon (the fact that the screenplay can’t even keep its basic “facts” straight is some indication of just what a train wreck this In the Name of the King is).

Boll almost seems to be doing something clever as some introductory snippets play out interstitially between the credits. We see Hazen evidently on a kill mission, and then that whole sequence begins again after the credits have ended. Is Boll playing with some kind of time travel paradox? Alas, there’s nothing half so creative going on—it just seems to be a simple case of either Boll or his edited cutting and pasting moments from the first actual sequence in the film backwards into the credits sequence. The opening scene at least establishes Hazen as a ruthlessly efficient killer, and then we get the absolutely heartstring tugging moment of Hazen looking at a watch his deceased wife evidently gave to him and lamenting the fact that she’s not around anymore. Are you sobbing with grief yet? Stay tuned—you probably will be, though not for the reasons you usually do when watching a film.

Hazen wants to leave his killing life behind him, but one last mission—with a two million dollar payday—awaits, and he reluctantly agrees to take it. The kidnapping of the little girls in question turns out to be a ridiculously easy affair (wouldn’t a national head of state and/or a billionaire have bodyguards for his kids?), but as Hazen is spiriting the girls away into a storage container, he notices a weird medallion hanging on one of them. It just so happens it matches a tattoo his late wife had him get on his arm years ago. When he places the medallion next to the tattoo for comparison purposes, suddenly a vortex opens in front of him, and he’s sucked through, ending up in Bulgaria in the Middle Ages. If anyone is expecting any high-falutin’ explanation about the medallion and/or the tattoo, they have obviously never seen a Uwe Boll movie. It’s best to just let things play out and hope that an ending is somewhere in sight.

Hazen almost instantly hooks up with two warrior princesses (whom I will jokingly refer to as Xena and Lena) who are in the midst of an internecine war with their nefarious uncle, who has killed their father and assumed the throne. They also worship the bizarre symbol that Hazen has tattooed on his arm, and so see his magical arrival as a gift from the gods. Oh, and there’s also a fire breathing dragon menacing everybody, just for lo-fi CGI effects sake. Needless to say, Hazen, though initially as unwilling to help here as he was to kidnap the kids back in his own time period, ultimately helps set everything right, though when he’s called back to his own time, the dragon also comes along for the ride, offering one last sequence of fairly ridiculous looking special effects.

There’s very little here that bears any interest. Boll is evidently appealing to some segment of the buying public, or he is an almost unfathomable salesman himself, able to get funding for his movies and then distribution deals with vaunted studios like Fox. In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission is typical Boll in just about every way possible. It’s largely uninvolving, has rote effects, laughable characterizations and a completely predictable plot. The fact that there’s a marauding dragon flying around 21st century Bulgaria leads me to believe that despite the moniker of this “last” outing, there is a fourth entry due any day.

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer. Boll and his cinematographer Mathias Neumann opt for a handheld strategy for almost all of this film, and the result is a "jiggly cam" morass of instability and at least the perception of softness, since the camera literally never alights on any given object for more than a second or two. Boll also seems intent on lightning fast pans during action sequences, perhaps to hide the fact that no adequate fight choreography was done. The result is an okay looking high definition presentation that offers reasonably well saturated color and actually quite good fine detail for the nanosecond or two that you're able to see something in close-up. The CGI is very soft and ill defined, making the dragon seem like less of a threat than a giant flying blob of gray.

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sounds about what you would expect a typical movie of the week to offer. There are occasional fairly decent surround effects, including things like galloping horses panning through the soundfield and the whoosh of the dragon's fire hitting various objects, but for the most part this is a fairly restrained track which nonetheless presents dialogue very cleanly and clearly. There are no issues with any kind of damage or other problems to report.

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of In the Name of the King III: The Last Mission (1080p; 14:38). If you've ever wanted to see Uwe Boll talking with his mouth stuffed full of banana, this is the supplement for you. And, yes, utilizing Roman numerals rather than Arabic certainly ups the class quotient of the title.

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's truly hard to fathom how Uwe Boll just keeps rollin' along like Old Man River. I personally have yet to meet one single person who likes his movies, and yet he evidently has absolutely no problem raking in enough cash to keep making them and finding willing distributors. I frankly can't imagine even those who might have had a passing tolerance for the first In the Name of the King to find much in this third installment worth watching.